Blessed Is The Man Who Trusts In The Lord

Well, good morning, and I'm very glad to be with you even in this way, even as I look at a little camera on a cell phone. I'm very glad to be able to meet with you. I wish I could see you all, but I fear that if I were able to see all of you on a screen, it would be more distracting even than looking at the back of a cell phone. So I suppose I'm glad that I can't see you all right this second, but I do wish that you were here so that we could see each other in person. Our text this morning is going to be Jeremiah chapter 17. We're going to be studying verses 5 through 10. So if you have a Bible, as I'm talking for the next minute, go ahead and open your Bibles up to Jeremiah chapter 17, verses 5 through 10. This text, or at least part of it, I think will be familiar to some of us. And this passage deals with our hearts, our hearts' affections, and really the question of who we trust. What do we trust? Where is our hope?

And this is a theme, this question of our heart's affections and what do we trust, what do we hope in. This is a theme that's been on my mind quite a bit over the past few months because I think this is what is being tested or revealed to us as we've gone through this pandemic. And will continue to be revealed to us and we will continue to work through it as we continue to go through this. This whole situation is not over and won't be for a good while. And so the helpful thing for us to do is to realize that when our heart gets revealed, when our lives get upset, what our commitments are, what we love, what we trust, become more evident to us. And one of the things we might find is that we've believed something to be true of us that wasn't actually true of us. And that's one of the things that we're going to be looking into this morning. And so in these times as we...

look to our hearts, and as we examine our hearts, it's very important that we think and behave and assess ourselves as Christians. It's very common when the questions of our priorities are brought up to be defensive. If you wanted to upset somebody, one of the easiest ways you can do it is ask what they spend their money on. If they were having trouble and they said, well, we don't have any money, if you were to say, well, what do you spend your money on? And they said, well, the things we need. And you say, no, I mean like, I mean like really, like would you mind me looking at, would you mind telling me what you actually spent your money on? They'd get very defensive and they'd say, no, no, no, that's actually none of your business. It's something very private. It's something that's theirs and theirs alone. And the reason that we get that way about money or about our time or these sorts of things, why'd you buy that new car or why this or why that or whatever, is because those things tell us something about our hearts.

And the reason we cover those things up and we hide them is because we go, I know what's in my heart and it's none of your business. And we don't want other people to look into our hearts. We don't want them to make any sort of a judgment about what decisions we've made because we've convinced ourselves oftentimes that something is true of us. And we don't want that being brought under scrutiny. Well, that's exactly what the scripture does for us. That's exactly what the Lord promises he will do, is scrutinize our hearts. And so what would be helpful to us is to not be shocked or appalled or opposed, really, to that work when that time comes. And so as we study our text this morning, it's a pretty simple text. Jeremiah compares two men, a cursed man and a blessed man. And he uses an analogy, a plant, to describe each man. So he makes this comparison between the blessed man and the accursed man. And then at the end, he admonishes us.

with regard to our hearts, with regard to what we think of ourselves. Because if I were to ask you, are you a blessed man or an accursed man? I think all of us would say, I want to be blessed. I want to be the blessed man. And if I pushed you hard enough, you might throw your hands up in the air and say, but I'm an accursed man. I'm that guy. I'm not the other one. And I'd say neither one of those things are actually all that helpful. Because in the end, you're not the judge of your own heart. The Lord is. And so that's what we're going to be looking at as we study this text this morning. I would like for you to listen now as I read Jeremiah chapter 17, verses 5 through 10.

but will live in stony wastes in the wilderness, a land of salt without inhabitant. Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord and whose trust is the Lord. For he will be like a tree planted by the water that extends its roots by a stream. It will not fear when the heat comes, but its leaves will be green. And it will not be anxious in a year of drought, nor cease to yield fruit. The heart is more deceitful than all else. and is desperately sick. Who can understand it? I, the Lord, search the heart. I test the mind, even to give to each man according to his ways, according to the results of his deeds. This is the word of the Lord. Now, in this passage, Jeremiah compares two men, and he likens them to plants. The first man is cursed, the second man is blessed. And what I want to do is go through each one of those men and describe them to you.

Now, before I get into it, I want to say one thing to you. I think there's wisdom in the way that this text is written and that the cursed man is spoken of and that he's spoken of first. And I think the reason that the cursed man is spoken of first is to break us free of our pride. You know if you've ever been trying to get something off your car and there's a bolt that's rusted on there? The first thing you have to do before you can... deal with the new part in fixing it is you've got to break that old rusty bolt loose first. And it's the hardest part of the job. But if that bolt won't come free, you can't fix what's wrong. And so we have the same sort of thing going on in our text. First, the rusty bolt of our hearts has to be broken free. And so I think that's why it starts with the cursed man. So how is this cursed man described? And by the way, I think it should go without saying that none of us want to be the cursed man. If you were to ask 10 people on the street,

Would you rather be cursed by God or blessed by God? I don't know that there's hardly anyone who would say, I'd rather be cursed by God. And so we all understand from the beginning that this is not the thing we ought to aspire to. This is a warning to us. It's something we ought to avoid. And yet, it is the state of all of our hearts apart from Christ. It's one thing to say, you ought not to want to be cursed. And then you have to follow it up and say, but apart from Christ. that's who you are. And that's a hard thing to hear straight out of the gate. I don't want to be cursed. And they say, you're right, you don't want to be cursed, but the problem is you are. So what does it mean to be cursed? The goal of this text is not that you would throw your hands up in despair and give yourself further to sin because you think that there is no hope. That's not the point. But to have this text be helpful to you, you have to first say, well, who am I? What am I like? How does the scripture describe me?

What is the natural state of things with me? How does Scripture describe my temptations to sin? In this passage, they're described as a man who trusts in mankind. Now, what's that mean to trust in mankind? Well, simply what it means is that when you need help or you have a problem, you look to man to fix it. All right? Now, as I said, that's the original state that all of us come from. That's the way we all still are. You know the interaction that you have with people. Hey, how are you? Oh, I'm fine. You sure you don't look? Yeah, I'm just tired. And sometimes people will say, are you sure you're just tired? Yeah, I'm just tired. But how often is that actually the case? I've had people tell me they don't like that question because they know that nobody really cares about the answer to it.

They're not really interested in how you're actually doing. And so it's this fake transaction that goes on where we're both agreed that whatever the real problem is, we aren't going to acknowledge it, deal with it. We're going to handle it ourselves. This is our original state. We like to be to ourselves. We like to carry our own load, our own burdens. We don't want to burden other people. We don't want to be embarrassed by them knowing what's going on. This is... out of the gate, who we are and what we're like. And so whenever there's a problem in our lives or whenever we need help, the first thing that happens is we think, what do I need to do to solve this problem? And what's going on in the subtext or behind the scenes in that question, in that interaction in your heart and in your mind is, I don't want anybody else to know about this. I don't want any of this exposed. And what I'm submitting to you is,

That is for you to trust in mankind. The principle that you have in your heart of keeping all of your troubles to yourself, to not be known, to not be exposed, to never talk about the problems you're having right now, but only talk about the problems that you had in the past. No, last month was really hard. My wife and I, we were just having a fit. Or two weeks ago, my kids were crawling up the walls. Or a month ago, I was worried about work. But I'm fine now. If this is the way you think, if this is the way you talk, then what I submit to you is this is you trusting in mankind. This is you looking to yourself for strength. That privacy that all of us maintain at very high cost is to trust in mankind, is to be cursed as this text says. And so whenever we have a problem, our first answer is always, I'll fix this myself.

Now maybe you think that just yourself. Maybe if you're married, you and your spouse say, we'll fix this ourselves. We have some trouble in our marriage, we'll fix this ourselves. We have some trouble with our kids, we'll fix this ourselves. Because underneath all of it in our hearts, we don't like needing help. And so we look to ourselves first. Now what happens if we can't fix our problems ourselves? Well, then we look for help outside of ourselves, but we look for a very particular type of help. And if you were all here right now, I would ask you, Where do you look for help, and what does it look like? And you'd all kind of look at me and go, I'm not telling you my secrets. And I'd say, okay, well, then I'll tell you your secrets. The kind of help you look for is if you're going to ask a person, you want them to be someone anonymous. You would rather unburden yourself and tell your problems to a complete stranger than to your brother or to your friend. But more likely than not, if you have a problem, you're going to look on the Internet for an answer. Why?

Because it's anonymous. Because you can get all the help you need, whether it's counseling, whether it's a solution to whatever sort of problem you have. You're going to be on YouTube. You're going to Google it. You're going to be on WebMD. You're going to go find the answer to your problem, whatever it is. Google, please tell me how to fix my problem because I don't want anybody else to know. Do you ever read when you search things on Google what, you know, how to, you know, whatever it is you're putting in? Do you ever look at what Google tells you people ask? Do you ever look at those questions and go, those are awful. You should ask a person that question. Like, you need real help. If that's a question you're asking, and if enough people ask that question that Google is anticipating, that might be your question. Have you ever not thought, Google isn't going to help with this. And so we are shot through with a commitment to trusting in mankind. This is a natural state of things, and it's so pervasive in our lives that I don't think we even realize it.

We try to fix our problems ourselves. We're mankind. We're flesh. When we can't, we look to the wisdom of other people, but not the people who know us. Strangers. Because if we're going to get help apart from ourselves, we want it to be private. And so as I've said earlier, I want to reiterate to you, a large part of our commitment to privacy is a commitment to trusting in mankind, if you were to trace it back to the root. How much trouble or unconfessed sin have you borne in your life? Because you didn't want to tell anybody. You weren't willing for it to be known, and so you suffered under it. David described that in the Psalms. He said, my body wasted away. When I kept quiet about my sin, my bones wasted away within me. Have you not felt that? The reason is because you wouldn't have anyone know. You wouldn't have the Lord know especially.

Now, it's a silly thing for us if you think about it. We could get our theology out and we could say, oh, look, looky here, like we know the Lord sees everything and he knows everything. And I'd say that's true and it's good. And we all need to live like that's true, not just say that's true. We all say there's nothing that's hidden from the eyes of the Lord. He knows everything. And I say, okay, well, if that's really, really true and nothing can be hidden from him, does it make any sense then that we hide it from our brothers? Our sisters, from our husbands and our wives, from our children, from our parents. It doesn't make any sense. And yet this is the thing we do. This is trusting in ourselves. This is trusting in mankind. And it's a bad place to be. And so if you're feeling and you're listening right now, I hope you feel like a rusty bolt that I'm cranking on with a big wrench so that I can break it free. I just want you to say, that's me. That's me. That's me. That's how I am.

I'm not saying this to you because I'm not that way. I'm saying this to you because it is how I am and I know it's how you are. Whenever someone comes to me and they have a problem or they want advice or they're unsure and I don't know what to ask them or I don't know how to go forward, the thing that's going on in my head before I say much of anything to them as I'm asking them questions is I do my best to put myself into their shoes and I say, what would I do if I were in your shoes? And I think, Would I lie about this? Yeah, there's a potential I'd lie. So I ask questions that are very pointed and very simple yes or no questions, and I look you right in the eye and say, are you lying to me? And people are like, why would you ask me if you're lying to me? And I say, well, because I might lie in this situation, and I don't want you to. I want to help you. And then I think, well, maybe I'd minimize the situation. Well, maybe I wouldn't tell the whole story. Maybe I wouldn't give the context of what happened.

You know, when this happens at home with my kids and someone comes in and they're crying and they've got a goose egg or something, they go, he hit me, he hit me. And I go, oh, he did. Very clear, I can see. And then I ask the question, well, did you do anything before he hit you? And all of a sudden the kid's like, oh. If they did something, they go, oh, well. You're not just going to take my goose egg at face value and discipline him. You're going to ask if I hit him first. And I'd say, yeah, I'm going to ask that question. And I actually want to know the answer to that question because it's conceivable to me that you wouldn't tell me the whole story. And so I want us to see all of the ways. Now, this is not all of the ways. We could talk for now for quite a while about what it means to trust in ourselves, to trust, to have mankind, to have flesh as our strength. But I hope that at this point, you understand that this is a problem in your heart and in your life.

When you have trouble, your first response is, we need help. Who can we talk to? This is going to hurt, but it's necessary. We need to pray. Instead, we go, how am I going to fix this? How am I going to do damage control? How am I going to keep this from getting out? What I want to do is break you free from that to where you're in play now and you're going, yeah, that's a bad thing and I do it. Now what? Before I get to now what, I want to say one thing further because our text says one thing further. It says, cursed is the man who trusts in mankind and makes flesh his strength. And then there's this other statement, and whose heart turns away from the Lord. And so this is a further description of the result of trusting in yourself or in mankind. It's that it drives you away from the Lord. If your heart trusts in mankind, if you trust in yourself, if you think you can fix all of your problems, you are actively separating your heart from

The Lord Jesus Christ. You are proactively saying, I do not need your help. I do not want your help. I will clean up my own mess by myself. Thank you, Lord, for what you do. But when it comes to the real problems of my life and the real struggles of my heart, thank you, I'll handle it myself. Now, there are two things I want to address about this driving you away from the Lord. And I realize that... For some of you, this might be difficult. And my goal is not to make it difficult, but to get you through the hardship so that you're actually broken free. Some of you, if you're that rusty nut, might be broken free by now, but some of you are probably still not broken free yet. So I'm going to take two more hacks at it. The first is, doesn't God use people? Am I supposed to just get my help directly from the Lord? Am I not supposed to need people? And I say, no, that's not what I'm talking about.

Of course God uses means. The question is not whether people actually help you. There's a difference between having people help you and trusting in your flesh. Reliance on other people is not what's being discouraged in this passage. Because I know that what Satan will do with some of you in your own hearts is he'll say, oh, see, we're not supposed to trust other people, so we just won't talk to anybody about anything. We're just going to trust the Lord directly, just him and me, and nobody has to know anything. learning the absolute wrong lesson. That's not what this text teaches. Do you hear? That is not what this text teaches. I am not saying you shouldn't talk to people. I'm not saying you shouldn't rely on people. What I'm saying is you shouldn't trust in them because that's what the text says. This whole passage is about trust and what your heart trusts in. It is very possible for you to praise God and be thankful for the help that he provides to you through other people.

That's as it should be. And so God uses means. And oftentimes that's people. And it's appropriate and good for us to receive help from other people because God has sent them to us. And it's very wicked and wrong of us to put our hope and our trust in them in that process. And you think, well, that's kind of hard. How do I know which way is which? And I say that's the tension that we live in as Christians, and it's something that we can help each other with. And we can trust the Lord to reveal to us over time. But you can't avoid the tension. It's not more holy for you to keep everything to yourself and just only ever deal with the Lord directly. Now, I'm going to come to why. That might be scandalous to you. You might say, well, what do you mean? You mean I have to have people? And I'm going, in a word, yes. But we're going to come to that in a minute, okay? Now, what's the other problem that people would have with this? They say, well, I have to fix all my problems because the Lord doesn't.

I used to trust the Lord with my problems. I've had pain in my life. I've had difficulty and hardship. And God didn't fix it. He didn't help. He abandoned me in it. And that, I can tell you, is not the sort of thing you put on Facebook, and that's not the sort of thing people say out loud with their mouths. But it's very true, and it's a very real temptation that Christians face, is to think that God has abandoned them, to think that they have no help, and so they've decided, I have to fix all my own problems. I'm the only one who cares enough.

And so at this point, what I want us to do is I want you to look at the imagery of the bush. And this is going to be hard, but this is my last crank on the bolt to try to break it free. Jeremiah describes the cursed man as a bush in a desert that'll live in stony places in the wilderness, a land of salt without inhabitant. What I want to say to you is if you're tempted to believe this lie that God has abandoned you, that he has no help to you, that he doesn't care, I want you to see that You might be the kind of person who likes feeling that way. Now, that's a hard thing, but listen to it. You might be the kind of person who likes to get upset about stuff, who likes to be bitter. And you think, well, I don't like to be angry and I don't like to be bitter. And I'd say, but if that's what you're saying to me right now, I don't like to be angry and I don't like to be bitter, you're proving my point. Yes, you do. What is it to be tempted by bitterness and anger except to have a part of your flesh that wants to be that way? Yes, you do want to be angry and bitter.

You say, no, I want to be set free from it. And I say, yeah, I know you do, but are you willing to fight against it? Or do you just want to be plucked up out of it and just have it removed from you without having to struggle against it? And if you don't understand your life as a Christian, as a life of war, a life of battle, a putting off of the old man and a putting on of the new man in the midst of battle, then you don't understand the terms of your faith. And so my hope is that you will understand those terms. And that when you find that sort of bitterness and that sort of anger and that sort of frustration welling up inside of you, that you would say, there's something wrong inside of me. With me, not with the Lord, but with me. I'm sure some of you have been to Arizona or to the desert. I was in Arizona a few years ago with Vanessa. And at one point, we went on this boat tour on this lake. It was very beautiful.

From the boat, it was very beautiful. We were in the desert, but we were on water. Not a common thing, but there we were. And as you look out on the cliffs and the banks, there was bald eagles. There was all kinds of beautiful stuff. It was very cool. But when you get close to the topography of a desert, what is true about every plant in the desert? What do all of them have? Do you know? Thorns. Every single one of them has thorns. They're the nastiest. Gnarliest things to be around. They might be beautiful from across the lake, but they're not fun to walk among. Everything has thorns and thistles. It's not a pleasant place to be. And this man, this cursed man, is described as one who dwells in the desert, who might appear like a faithful Christian from a distance, but when you get close, you find actually he's covered in thorns and thistles. And so...

consider yourself and say, you know, that's probably, at least in some part, true of me. That I have this commitment to privacy and to knowing and to being the one that bears my own burdens in such a way that from a distance I look okay. But when you get close, you find, no, that's not actually the case. I'm actually just, you know, the Christian veneer is very thin, and underneath it there's thorns and thistles and briars and frustrations and angers and bitternesses and all that kind of stuff inside of you. And that's a heart problem with us. And so that's the cursed man. And that's what we have to see ourselves as being so that we know what to repent of, what to move away from. Now we need to talk about what to move toward. Jeremiah goes on then and he describes the blessed man. This blessed man trusts in the Lord. And he describes him as a tree that's planted by a stream. And its roots go spread out and they go down and they take hold of the...

the food, the nourishment that the stream provides. This tree has deep, strong roots. Now why does a tree, have you ever wondered why trees need to have, why it's good for them to have deep, strong roots? I used to work with trees, and everyone always has this idea that whatever is above ground in a tree, that's the same thing that's below ground. And they have this idea that if it's 50 feet tall, Above ground, it's 50 feet deep below ground, and that's not actually the case. Most trees, if you were to think about it, they're balanced. They sit out in the ground, and they have what are called buttress roots. If you look at a tree in the trunk, as it goes down, it goes down like this, and then it has this root flare. It goes out. And what you're seeing when it goes out is you're seeing the start of these big buttress roots, these feet, if you will, of a tree.

Three or four, you know, five, depends on the tree. But it's basically sitting there balanced on those buttress roots. And off of those buttress roots grow a whole network and mat or system of smaller roots that suck up moisture and nutrients out of the ground and feed the tree. And it is true that those roots will go out about as far as the canopy is. If the tree's 50 feet wide, your roots will probably be about 50 feet wide. But how deep will they be? Well, it depends on the condition of soil. But here in Indiana, I'd venture to tell you, I can almost guarantee you that even those big buttress roots are not more than a foot to 18 inches in the ground. They're not way down deep.

And so what happens is those roots go down and they reach out and they're like little hooks into the dirt. They go into all the fissures in the dirt and they take hold of it as they suck the nutrients out of it. Now why does a tree need to hold on to the ground? Well, did the storm wake you up last night? Did you hear the thunder and the lightning? I heard the thunder and the lightning. Some of you may not have. We did. And we have these two big trees that grow right behind our house and I always wonder when something's going to break out of one of them.

But the reason trees need these buttress roots and they need strength and stability and nourishment from the ground is that when the storm comes, as our text describes it, when the heat of day comes, they're able to withstand it. They're able to keep from falling over. Now, if you were to compare that root system that I've just described to you with the root system of a desert plant, what is true of a desert plant's root system? It's very small. It's very shallow. Why? Because there's no nourishment any further down in the dry soil. And so they're very small. And so what happens when the storm comes in the desert? The plants fall over. You ever seen a cactus when they fall over? They've got these little tiny, they're like one of those things you punch that has the big weight in the bottom, you know, and you punch it and the clown, it falls and it just comes back up. That's what a cactus is like. It has this kind of ballast in the bottom. It does not have roots. Because there's nowhere else for it to go to get moisture.

So it just doesn't have roots. Same thing with palm trees. If you've ever been down to Florida or looked at trees that grow in arid, dry places, you ever seen them propped up with two-by-fours nailed into them in stakes? Because when they fall over, there's no roots. There's no root system. They can't withstand the storm because they don't have roots. And so this blessed man is described as having roots that go down, that take hold of the nourishment and the water. the life that exists below. Now, if you were going to plant a tree, you'd say, well, I'm going to plant a tree in a place like this blessed man. I'm not going to plant a tree in a place like the cursed man. I'd say that would be good. So do you think that God has planted you in a desert or by a stream? Where would he plant his children? He's going to plant his children by streams. And that is not to say that difficult, hard times, storms, the heat of day don't come to trees planted by streams. They do.

But the blessed man who's trusted in the Lord has been put there by his God, and he's able to flourish. He's able to withstand the storm, withstand the heat, maintain green leaves, and bear fruit because he trusts in the Lord. Now I want to ask you a question. Have you ever looked around at other Christians that you, in your mind, think they're faithful? They're the kind of Christians we ought to be. You ever been jealous of them? You ever thought, man, I wish I was just holy like they are because they don't seem to have the sort of temptations and troubles I do. I bet that there's not one of us that hasn't had that thought in some way or another. You ever thought, that's not fair. The next thing I want to ask you is, have you ever thought that the Lord's been kind to them but not to you and that the reason they're doing better than you and the reason you admire them is because they don't have the troubles you do. They have an easy Christian life. Have you ever thought that?

The reason they're blessed and the reason they're faithful and the reason they're happy and the reason they're all of the things I think I should be but I'm not is because they don't have the trouble in their life. That's not fair. What I want to tell you and what this text tells you is that their faithfulness, as you see it, doesn't come from not being tested. It comes from their trust in the Lord. Because if you get close enough to people's lives who you think are faithful and admirable, who have loved the Lord, and I'm not saying that they haven't or that they're not. But I'm saying if you get close enough to their life and you hear what they've dealt with, what they've had going on, what the temptations have been, what hardships they've faced, you find that their life has not been an easy one. They've not been without opportunity to become angry. They've had all the same opportunities you have. And the thing I want you to admire about them is not what you perceive their life as. What I want you to admire is their trust in the Lord. The blessing you see with your eyes is because they trust the Lord.

Now here's something that I hope gives you hope. In this comparison between the cursed man and the blessed man, the Lord offers himself to us. How cruel would it be? Think of it this way. How cruel of a trick would it be to offer blessing, to say that the blessed man trusts in the Lord, if it was a blessing that no man could receive? Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord. Sight kidding, actually. I'm not interested in being trusted. I'm untrustworthy. That would be a cruel trick. And so I'd submit to you that the Lord's not playing a cruel trick on you. He's offering himself to you and his blessing without qualification. And so we need to trust him. We can trust him. It's safe to trust him. And trusting him doesn't remove the storm that might come in your life. Undoubtedly, you face them and you'll face more. In those storms and in those trials, those times of uncertainty, your heart's being revealed to you. Who do you trust?

What do you trust? What are you willing to lose? What are you not willing to lose? I thought about ending the sermon right there because it's helpful. And then the familiar part, the familiar verses, at least to me, come next. And I've never really paid much attention to what comes before or after them. But the familiar verses in this text are actually, to me, verses 9 and 10. It talks about your heart. It says the heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick. Who can understand it? The context of that is the blessed man and the cursed man. And then it says the heart is desperately sick, deceitful. Who can understand it? And we should all be sitting here, in answer to this rhetorical question, we should all say, not me, not me, I can't. I could spend the rest of my life trying to search these things out in my heart and trying to figure out what my heart's doing, and I wouldn't have it figured out. Why?

Because the heart's more deceitful than all else and desperately sick. And what we should know is the people who are most likely to be deceived by their heart is them. You are the most likely candidate to be deceived by your heart more than anybody else. So you might want to throw your hands up in the air now and go, so cursed man bad, blessed man good. I'm a cursed man by nature. I need God's help and his grace to be a blessed man and I want that. And then, As you're spun all around by this, you go, and my heart's desperately sick and deceitful, and I can't trust it, and now what? Where will I go, and to whom shall I turn? I don't know which way's up. The mercy in this passage is that you're not supposed to judge your own heart. You can't. Now you might be like, but what do you mean? And I'm like, okay, well, just give me a minute. I don't mean do whatever you want. I don't mean trust your heart. What I do mean is don't judge your heart.

Because the very next verse says, I, the Lord, search the heart. I test the mind, even to give to each man according to his ways, according to the result of his deeds. The Lord's the one who's going to judge our hearts. The way he's going to judge our hearts is through our actions and through our obedience. He says, according to his ways, according to the results of his deeds. And so in all of this, am I the cursed man? Am I the blessed man? I don't want to be the cursed man, but I'm really bent that way. I want to be the blessed man. I don't know how to be the blessed man. What's it look like? What kind of heart do I have? What's going on? What the scripture tells you is, don't, don't get wrapped around the axle of thinking about your own heart. Know that it's desperately sick and deceitful.

That's what you need to know about it. You don't need to go searching around to find that out. The Scripture told you. That's the prognosis. That's what's wrong, okay? The Lord is going to deal with fixing that, judging that. You want to not trust your heart. Now, you might think, well, but when we're Christians, the Scripture tells us that we're given a new heart. Our old heart's taken away, and our new heart's, we get this new heart of flesh, and so we don't have this problem anymore. And I go, that's an... that is an ongoing process of your heart being changed and renewed and conformed to the image of Jesus Christ. That's not something that happens overnight. Not in its entirety. It starts at a definite time. But that heart, if you're thinking that way, where Ezekiel says, we'll remove your heart of stone, we'll give you a heart of flesh, that's something that...

It's imagery to tell us, it's meant to teach us the hardness of our heart and the softness that the Lord will provide. The contrast, the change. It's not to say that all of a sudden Christians can trust their hearts because you know as well as I do that Christians still want to do wicked stuff. You still want to do wicked stuff, don't you? So don't trust your heart. Okay? Don't trust your heart. Don't judge your heart. Paul says in 1 Corinthians, I think it's 4, he says, I don't examine myself. I'm not even aware, I'm not even conscious of examining myself because he's under such intense scrutiny. Everything he's doing and what he says is, I know that the Lord's going to judge these sorts of things. And I, for my part, I just am not going to worry about that. I'm going to give myself to the work that the Lord's given me to do. I'm going to push ahead with zeal and vigor and by faith.

and in the power of his grace, and I'm going to trust him to use me however it is he wants to use me, that's what I'm going to pay attention to. And that's the same message of this text. My goal in preaching all of this to you is not to say, slow down, circle the wagons, what's wrong with your heart? We know what's wrong with your heart. It's broken. It lies. It wants to love everything in this world except Jesus Christ. We already know that. That's the temptation that you were born with. You're going to, in some manner, face that temptation and have to fight against that temptation until you die. You already know that. We don't need to stop anything to figure that out. You know, when you go into a court, like a courtroom, if you will, everything that goes on in a courtroom is aimed at the judgment, right? The declaration, guilty, not guilty, innocent, what have you.

What you need to be focused on, you need to think in that courtroom as one of the lawyers and not the judge. You're not the judge. You're the lawyer. Now, what does a lawyer have to do? Well, a lawyer has to make his case, right? Now, how does a lawyer make his case? Well, simply put, he has evidence. He says, here's evidence to support what I believe to be true. And he concerns himself with the evidence and building his case based on all the evidence that he can amount. together. That's your job. The verdict is going to be an examination of the evidence. You don't get to make the judgment. You get to accumulate the evidence. And the evidence is how you live your life and what you trust in. That's the evidence that you and I as Christians are supposed to give ourselves to gathering up. We're to gather up evidence that says, trusts in the Lord. He trusts in the Lord. She trusts in the Lord.

Our family, we trust in the Lord. Our job is to gather up that evidence, to make that case, to present it. And when we do, what we will say is, all of this evidence is an indication of the Lord's mercy and his kindness to me. I received it. I trusted him. And I followed him where he led me. I didn't grumble and I didn't complain and I didn't turn back. I submitted myself to his will in my life, and this is the fruit of it. And God will be pleased by it. Because that fruit and that evidence is what he produced in you and through you. And he'll be glorified by the new heart that he's given to you. And you'll be delighted with the outcome. And not only will you be delighted with the outcome, you will have come to be delighted with the process. You'll be able to look back over the evidence of your life and say, thanks be to God, look what he did for me. And so in these times of trial, where our hearts are all stirred up, what we have is an opportunity not to look over our hearts, but to look over our evidence, to look over our ways, to look over the result of our deeds and say, what am I producing? Is what I'm producing the fruit of trusting the Lord or not?

Am I still living in a rat race of hiding and covering up all of my struggles and my sins and my failures and my faults and my guilt and all that? Do I just live in a cacophony of all those things swirling around me? Or am I willing to be known by God and by his people so that I can produce the fruit of trust in the Lord? That's the question that you have before you. And all that's happened and all of the upheaval in your lives is that question's been raised from the depths up to the front and center and saying, what's the answer to this question? What do you believe? Whom do you trust? What are you working for? What do you want to be yours at the end? And if what you want as a Christian is to be found faithful to Jesus Christ and to give glory to him, then all of a sudden you have a context, a longer-term picture.

That this current struggle that you're facing exists in. It's going to pass. It's going to change. You hear people say, well, I don't know if I like the new normal. And I go, well, didn't you think anything needed to change? You don't have to like what other people want to be the new normal. Like, I can't hug people and I can't, you know. You don't have to want that to be the new normal. But you should want the new normal to be. I'm better for this. I'm newer. I'm renewed. I'm more like Jesus because of it. I'd love for that to be the new normal. I'd like for this whole mess and everything that it's produced, in the end, to have been a big step forward in my sanctification. But you've got to trust the Lord right now. Not six months from now and we go, yeah, I can see now how the Lord was so faithful to me in all of this life. No, you have to do that now. You have to trust the Lord now. I mean, yes then, but now. That's our work.

And so the question at the end of all of it is, do you trust the Lord? And you probably say, no, I don't trust the Lord perfectly, so I must be one of those cursed men. And I say, well, instead of those two options, neither of which are true of Christians, there's no Christian who trusts the Lord perfectly because we're not yet what we will be. But it's also true that there's not a Christian who is cursed and who doesn't have some seed of faith and hope and trust that's growing. So how about this third option? That's not absolute and done right now, because after all, we're not standing before Jesus just yet in judgment. We're not perfect, and everything we do is some mixture of sin and obedience. Nothing is perfect yet. No judgments have been made. No conclusions have been drawn. And so instead of saying, do you trust in the Lord with the silent qualification, perfectly, how about we say, are you growing in trusting in the Lord? Or are you getting more angry and more bitter, more anxious or more fearful? Are you becoming...

more steady in your faith right now, or are you becoming less, more unstable? Are you bearing more good fruit right now or less? You look like a desert plant or a tree planted by a brook. These are the questions we should be asking ourselves on a daily basis, not just because there's a pandemic going on right now. These are the questions that Christians ought to always be asking themselves. So let's ask ourselves these questions as we go forward from here. Am I bearing good fruit? Am I trusting the Lord? Or am I getting more angry and more frustrated and are things churning more inside of me? Am I giving in to that? These are the questions for our heart. Let's pray.